To mark the 80th anniversary of Winston Churchill’s famous Fulton speech, the French Chapter of the International Churchill Society and Le Grand Continent organized an evening event at the Sorbonne to commemorate this occasion and place it in the context of both its time and the present day. The event at the Sorbonne, held in the prestigious Richelieu Hall, was a great success. The highlight of the evening was the reading of the full text of the speech by Lambert Wilson, who wonderfully portrayed the great British statesman. The audience was greeted by the president of the Sorbonne, Christine Neau-Leduc, as well as by Gilles Gressani, editor of the journal Le Grand Continent, and by Jean-Noël Tronc, president of the French Churchill Chapter. Historian François Kersaudy presented to the audience both the historical context in which this speech was delivered and the Western reactions: misunderstood at the time, this text proved to be prophetic. You can read the full speech and the comments by François Kersaudy and Jean-Noël Tronc published by Le Grand Continent here. The evening concluded with a speech by Galia Ackerman, editor-in-chief of Desk Russie, taking stock of the state of the world and calling on us to follow the example of the greatest statesman of the 20th Century. We reproduce that speech here.
Ladies and gentlemen, dear friends,
The Fulton speech transports us to a past when Winston Churchill and so many others were still allowed to dream of a better world. A world where the newly formed UN would play the major role of guardian of universal peace. Where the United States, at the height of its power, would bear a formidable responsibility toward the future as a great democracy. Where the Anglo-Saxon world, the bearer of progress and justice, would be united in working for the good of humanity. Where the peoples of the entire world would build together a Temple of Peace.
Eighty years later, we must acknowledge that these hopes and dreams, born after the terrible years of blood and tears during World War II, have not come to pass, much to the regret of those who believed with all their might in democracy and the “American dream,” such as myself, who was born and raised in the communist world, in the USSR.
However, part of the Fulton speech was prophetic. Churchill was the first to use the expression “Iron Curtain” to refer to Central and Eastern Europe, which had been militarily overrun by Soviet troops during their march on Berlin and was now included in “the Soviet sphere,” as Churchill put it. “This is certainly not the liberated Europe we fought to build up,” he observed. “Nor is it one which contains the essentials of permanent peace.”
Churchill knows that the battle for what lies behind the Iron Curtain is lost, for the time being at least, and he proposes to come to terms with Russia and the countries it controls in a sort of coexistence, under the general authority of the UN. He is nevertheless concerned for the free world: “Nobody knows what Soviet Russia and its communist international organization intends to do in the immediate future or what are the limits if any to their expansive and proselytizing tendencies,” he says. He speaks of the “communist fifth columns [which] are established and work in complete unity and absolute obedience to the directions they receive from the Communist center”.
It is this peril that Churchill would like to see contained: “the indefinite expansion of their power and doctrines”. And he emphasizes: “There is nothing they admire so much as strength, and there is nothing for which they have less respect than for weakness—especially military weakness.”
Stalin was furious. A week after the publication of the Fulton speech, Stalin granted an interview to Pravda, in which he described Churchill’s remarks as “a dangerous act, intended to sow discord among the Allied states and hinder their cooperation”. He even placed the British politician on a par with Adolf Hitler. Pravda published a cartoon in which Churchill, with his ever-present cigar, brandished a bomb in one hand and dragged the ghosts of Hitler and Goebbels behind him. Stalin’s reaction was particularly sharp to the assertion that the countries of Central and Eastern Europe were under Moscow’s political control. In response to this claim, he issued a stern rebuke to Churchill. It made clear that the USSR’s desire to have friendly governments in neighboring countries was not expansion, but a natural measure of self-defense.
It is from this point onward that we can speak of the Cold War between the “Communist bloc” (коммунистический лагерь) and the Western world.
Which brings me to Putin’s Russia. Vladimir Putin is not an honest historian, and he is steeped in the myths of past Soviet greatness. The ideology—or more precisely, communist rhetoric—has been rejected, but the practices of the communist regime have remained the same, amplified by new technologies.
Before our astonished eyes—for we believed that post-communist Russia would be a “normal,” capitalist, liberal, Westernized state—Putin’s regime quickly bared its teeth: first the Second Chechen War, beginning in 1999, when Grozny was razed to the ground and 10% of the Chechen people—100,000 people—were killed. Then the war against Georgia in 2008, which resulted in the amputation of 20% of the territory of an independent country, a former Soviet republic, and precipitated a change of government: an oligarchic, mafia-like regime controlled by Moscow now rules Georgia, suppressing all opposition.
In 2015, Russia sent its troops to Syria to help the al-Assad regime fight its opposition and, to a lesser extent, the Islamic State. Finally, and most importantly, in 2014, Russia militarily occupied Crimea and launched the war in the Donbas. In 2022, it took a giant leap forward in its territorial and geopolitical ambitions: in a major act of unprovoked aggression, it attacked all of Ukraine. This war, the most terrible in Europe since World War II, is still ongoing.
Add to this terrifying rhetoric directed at the West, which the regime’s ideologues denounce as rotten and threaten with the atomic bomb. Acts of sabotage orchestrated by Russia have been on the rise for years across Europe, while an armada of fake accounts generated by troll farms and other systems floods social media. They influence elections in various countries and distort the perception of reality among Western citizens and people around the world. The “fifth columns” Churchill spoke of are no longer driven by communist ideals, but they are more active than ever in our countries: journalists and politicians in the pay of the Russians, business circles of boundless venality, military personnel who appreciate “a firm hand,” a far-right that supports Russia’s so-called “clash of civilizations” for so-called traditional values, a segment of the far-left that supports Russia for “anti-imperialist” reasons, etc.
What have we, Westerners, done in the face of this onslaught? Let us recall this passage from the Fulton speech: “Up till the year 1933 or even 1935, Germany might have been saved from the awful fate which has overtaken her, and we might all have been spared the miseries Hitler let loose upon mankind. There never was a war in history easier to prevent, by timely action, than the one which has just desolated such great areas of the globe. It could have been prevented, in my belief, without the firing of a single shot, and Germany might be powerful, prosperous, and honored.”
This is a fair statement, and it applies to Russia today. We did not raise our voices to defend the Chechens and prevent the Russians from committing atrocities against them. Yet this model—based on subjugating civilians through mass killings, torture, and the destruction of their homes—is being fully applied today in Ukraine. The Georgians, who had a pro-Western president, Mikheil Saakashvili, and who were overwhelmingly pro-NATO (77%), saw in April 2008 in Bucharest their request to join NATO’s Membership Action Plan rejected, the first step toward joining NATO, which encouraged the Russian aggression that occurred just a few months later. And then, after that aggression, did we impose sanctions? Messrs. Kouchner and Sarkozy were duped by the Russians, and the entire Western world remained silent.
Finally, in 2014, we imposed a few timid sanctions, while yielding to the idea that Crimea was Russian—a deeply held but false belief among many of our fellow citizens. And when full-scale war began in February 2022, we did not clearly state our intention not only to help Ukraine survive, but to enable it to win the war against Russia. In fact, neither Europeans nor Americans have a clear idea of our objectives in this war, and Ukraine is paying the immense, immeasurable price of our timidity.
I would like to conclude by saying a few words about the state of the world. From the end of World War II until the collapse of the USSR, the world was bipolar. Today, it is no longer so, and the most tragic, the most unimaginable thing for Sir Winston Churchill, whose memory we honor today, is the dramatic change that has taken place in America. The UN is powerless, and the imperialist threat is no longer merely Russian and Chinese; it is also American. In the U.S. as in Russia, reactionary, millenarian, apocalyptic ideologies are invading the public sphere, and this raises fears that another of Churchill’s prophecies might come true: “The Dark Ages may return, the Stone Age may return on the gleaming wings of science, and what might now shower material blessings upon mankind may even bring about its total destruction.”
Can we still combat these forces of evil—Putinism and Trumpism alike? Here too, I encourage you to follow Churchill’s example. Refusing to capitulate even as the United Kingdom was the last European nation to resist the Nazi advance after France’s defeat, he organized the British armed forces and ultimately led them to victory against the Axis powers. Today, Europe must unite with the United Kingdom and play this role jointly with it, in order to safeguard our values and freedoms in the face of Russian expansionism and its desire to conquer our elites, and in the face of the American conservative revolution and its imperialist ambitions.
Born in Moscow, she has been living in France since 1984. After 25 years of working at RFI, she now devotes herself to writing. Her latest works include: Le Régiment immortel. La Guerre sacrée de Poutine, Premier Parallèle 2019; Traverser Tchernobyl Premier Parallèle, 2016.